Auckland Transport’s Ōtāhuhu Station is a new, integrated bus and train interchange serving the city of Auckland. In addition to allowing commuters to easily maneuver between bus and train lines, the recently opened facility features stunning ceiling-to-floor glass walls that reflect the local history and culture. With long hallways, large echo-ridden rooms and many reflective surfaces, the deployment presented Bartons with some significant acoustical challenges. In order to provide superb speech intelligibility and audio coverage in such a challenging acoustic environment, Bartons selected JBL by HARMAN Intellivox-DSX280 active beam-shaping, self-powered, column loudspeaker arrays for their excellent sound quality, enhanced clarity and balanced coverage.

“Apart from the need to have an intelligent speaker that could automatically adjust volume and actively manage the acoustically challenging space, we selected the Intellivox-DSX280 line because it delivers high measurable speech intelligibility,” said Rob Waddell, Lead Systems Engineer, Bartons Sound Systems. “With the many reflective surfaces and complex panelised ceilings, the Intellivox column array system with its beam shaping ability covered the zones perfectly, with minimal reflection off of the hard surfaces. We were able to effectively set the speakers up with full control of the near field and far field area and complete the project within the parameters given.”

The Intellivox-DSX280 is ideally suited for reverberant environments where improved speech intelligibility is required. A single Intellivox-DSX280 is capable of covering an area of up to 82-feet, while maintaining an even sound pressure over the audience area. An internal eight-channel amplifier eliminates the need for external amplification. Both of these factors allowed Bartons Sound Systems to provide maximum coverage within the project budget, while its modest array length made for easy and unobtrusive implementation in such an architecturally sensitive environment.

“Transportation facilities can be a challenging environment to provide quality audio,” said Ramesh Jayaraman, VP & GM HARMAN Professional Solutions, APAC. “We are pleased to see that our JBL Intellivox is able to meet those challenges head-on and ensure complete customer satisfaction. The well thought out technology behind the system helps us ensure that we are able to counter the intelligibility issues in such challenging environments. Thanks to our New Zealand partner Jands who coordinated with Bartons to ensure the challenges are met and the customer is satisfied.”